Vance on the beach with a quick catch

Hurricane Hugo hit St. Croix in September of 1989 and ravaged it. Jack, Sanita’s father (an opportunist) moved there a few months later and started selling tools out of a cargo container. He’d order them from Home Depot in Florida, double the price and sell them to ignorant natives. The island was 90 % black poor folks with their homes destroyed, who’d just received big FEMA checks to rebuild them. His sales where so swift he invited me and Sanita to join him there and share in this bonanza. We were having no fun in Dallas so we accepted and went in March.

I’d bought Sanita a diesel Volvo in Piedmont for a bargain because no one wanted a diesel. We noticed it in the local paper at a price of five-thousand dollars one week, then listed again at four-thousand the next, and a week later for three-thousand. It was fairly new so at this price we stepped in and bought it. We drove it from Dallas to Miami, stopping for four days at Disney World to Willy’s delight. Then we shipped it there and flew, living with Jack and his wife Kitty for a month. I worked and Sanita searched for and picked out an overpriced dwelling in a terrible location.

I don’t know why I always let her do the house-hunting after so many bad choices, (the worst were yet to come) but Jack had me in his shop the first day and Sanita had nothing to do but take care of Willy. After a few weeks of price gouging in his shop, selling power tools to men who had no idea how to use them, I was unhappy as a salesclerk, as it involved mangling the truth to innocent customers. So Jack introduced me to a crack-addicted electrician, Norman, and I began to work with him. The jobs were plentiful as there were few electricians on the island and every structure needed repair.

But I think there was some duplicity in this on Jack’s part, as he and his wife Kitty wanted Willy and would like nothing better than for me to fall into the trap of crack addiction and then manipulate Sanita, (which would have been easy) into some compromised position where she would have to give them custody. They weren’t beyond this cheat, as many other little hints and deeds suggested this while we were there, trying to split us apart. But such a plot had no chance of succeeding. I was no drug addict and still happily married.

The thousand dollar a month rental Sanita chose was a small, one bedroom guest house to a three times larger house with a swimming pool, a hundred feet away. The couple there rented both places, (the whole lot for two thousand), so we were definitely getting the short end of the stick. But they were a nice couple, our age, the husband a contractor, the wife idle like Sanita, so the two could lounge by the pool everyday. The problem was the location, on the dry, brown, east end of the island, barren and sweltering hot, with scorpions and bright-red poisonous millipedes and spiders common there. The millipedes, often five inches long, liked to attack people and had a poisonous, painful bite, crawling up your leg in a second or into one’s bed at night. Willy had two close calls. And at his size a large one might have killed him.

I met with a spider bite sitting by the pool on a lounge chair one Saturday night. It bit me on the knee. The bite wasn’t even noticeable. An hour later it began to itch, an hour later to swell and hurt. I limped the short distance home that night and in the morning could barely walk. After a miserable Sunday and with no idea how much worse it might get, Sanita drove me to a Doctor Monday morning who immediately recognized it and gave me a shot of cortisone which cured it almost miraculously within minutes. The swelling went down and the knee was once again flexible and pain free. I even went back to work right after that, still in my short-lived partnership with Norman.

Through Norman I was soon introduced to a real estate woman, Marjorie, (his former girlfriend) and she told us there were plenty of abandoned buildings, some right on the beach, where we could live for free. Many of the white owners had left the island and their property soon after the Hurricane, fed up and never coming back. They didn’t care what they left behind. So she showed us a three unit condo on a beautiful beach that needed a little fixing up.

Sanita and I loved it and moved in immediately. Our rent went from a thousand to zero for the next ten months. We had a thirty step walk from our door to the beach, all our own. Upstairs neighbors moved in a few weeks later, a couple our age with two children, one aged three a girl and a five year old a boy. Sanita became fast friends with Judy, an idle housewife like her. Gary her husband, a long-haired, blond, loud, strapping fellow, barrel-chested and beer drinking and also Texan, was an A.C. man. We shared a contract together installing range hoods in a forty unit condo. He was my opposite in most ways, but friendly, and a fine husband for Judy, who was a perfect friend for Sanita, with the same few interests, all on an intellectual par, all from Texas too. Imagine that.

Sanita and Judy sharing  their favorite hobby together

Jack and Kitty jumped in and took the third unit on the other side of the building. It was only two-thirds complete but Jack finished it off in a month, moved in and we were one big, dysfunctional family. The owner in Texas was a drunk but told Marjorie he was glad his place was being maintained and wanted nothing from us. Marjorie became our close friend. She visited us for a week when we moved to Seattle a year later. I spent many afternoons on her veranda, drinking rum and cokes and talking away the hours with her. She was well read and intelligent, a rare commodity on that island, so we hit it off perfectly.

Sanita would bring Willy over on a Sunday afternoon and as Sanita didn’t drink or care for literary conversation, would spread her towel on the beach right below us and watch Willy play or swim, while Marjorie and I enjoyed the shade and talked away. She was perhaps ten years older, her skin well tanned and wrinkled from so many years in the sun, skinny, and wore thick eyeglasses, without which she was blind. But bikini-clad, lounging in her chair beside mine, a mini-bar next to us, her sharp intellect and ability to drink many rums unimpaired along with me, made her my choice Sunday partner. We became close friends.

Even though I still had a hundred thousand in the bank I worked the whole year there making fifteen dollars or more an hour, more than we spent. I quit working for Norman within two months, after a fight when he punched me for leaving his tool-box open when we went for lunch. There was a lot of thievery going on and he felt that I, as his apprentice, made a huge mistake. Nothing was missing but I was apprentice no longer. Within days I found better and very satisfying work. It was industrial and physically taxing, using rigid conduit for the first time, ten feet long sticks four inches wide, threading the pipes on a big machine and screwing them together on racks. But this was new to me and interesting.

I met Vance from Texas, my age, and his skinny wife who befriended Sanita. Vance was a foreman helping construct the island’s first, large desalination plant, all the pieces shipped in from Israel. Our job was to assemble them. He was a smart and good foremen to his twenty men, always joking, but he quickly realized I was also very smart, on a level with him­ and we soon became a pair, sometimes for beers after work, on rare occasions sharing a few lines, a foursome on weekends, at his place or ours and on the nearby beaches, (there were some places off limits or dangerous for whites), and because he was a regular Texas boy Jack took to him immensely.

Vance and his wife, our best friends.

It was during these first months on the island that Sanita and I had our first major fight, hinting to me that all was not well in our relationship. Actually there was an incident a year earlier, which made me question her common sense, or more precisely, the lack of it, in a disturbing way. It happened when we were living in Dallas. Sanita, Betty and I decided to drive to a two day music festival in Austin. We rented a motel room with two beds and Willy was sick with a cold and getting worse. It was late evening. Sanita goes to a drug store and buys a bottle of cough medicine to stop his coughing. But as she’s standing there beside me trying to read the small print, she says that he has to drink the whole bottle. Her mother agrees with her.

Now I know he should get a teaspoon and that they don’t sell bottles of cough medicine as one dose. I show her the label, the word teaspoon and tell her this repeatedly but she insists on giving him a deadly overdose. She opens the bottle and even tries to pour it down his throat. I grab the bottle out of her hand, infuriated at her utter stupidity. Her mother sides with her. I say we take him to the hospital and let the professionals decide. We have a bitter, stupid argument ending up with me giving him the teaspoon, sleeping with him, my pants on, the bottle kept in my pocket all night, sleeping with him in my arms. They reluctantly go to bed, mad at me.

The next morning the cough is almost gone, he’s much better and lively. So everyone’s happy. We even catch a show that afternoon and drive home like nothing happened. But the fact they had such low I.Q.’s, dangerous to my child, kept me vigilant from then on. And it diminished my respect for her, chipped away at it even against my will. I loved her for her beauty and personality, her attractive traits, but not her mind.

My regard for her took a nosedive after that, hard to forget or get over. She still made every choice regarding Will’s schooling, all household matters, where and when we moved again. I handled all money matters and played the most respectful, loving husband. But as Willy grew older and we began to talk and play in ever greater, mutually satisfying depths, my closeness and relationship with him improved rapidly, while his with his mother deteriorated over time. It continued to worsen over the next ten years.

It was during that first two months on the East side that Sanita and I had our second serious fight. One night Willy started crying in his bed near ours just as we were trying to go to sleep. This vexed Sanita and she yelled at him to stop, not consoling him or asking him what his problem was. This rebuff only made him cry more. Then she lost her temper, got up and spanked him, which redoubled his crying. Until now she’d never spanked Willy for anything. I never did. He was only three. She was the one upsetting him. So I asked her nicely to just leave it alone. But it continued and she got out of bed again to spank him some more. This was total insanity on her part so I got up and just as she was about to hit him I grabbed her arm and said this was not happening. She freaked out, as if I’d assaulted her, bundled Willy up, (now all confused and quiet), ran to the car with him and drove off into the night.

I shrugged it off as a temper tantrum on her part and fell into a fine, deep sleep. My conscience was perfectly at ease with what I’d done, (preventing a senseless cruelty) and I was no longer affected by her aberrations from rationality. I woke up the next morning happy. It was a Sunday, bright sunshine and my day off. I made myself a fine breakfast and began reading a captivating history book on the crusades by Steven Runciman. I read and read all afternoon, having the finest time in ages, alone and undisturbed, drinking rum and cokes, expecting her to return any minute. But she didn’t. I went to bed wondering a bit what was going on but fell asleep quickly. The next morning I woke up to a banging on my patio window. It was a black policeman saying he had a restraining order against me and that I couldn’t come back here till it was settled in court.

It was almost work time with Norman but I had a few minutes to swing by the coffee shop where Jack sat each morning. I told him the whole story. He sat there expressionless and said nothing. That was Jack, often a dour man. He was always at his shop with Kitty, seven days a week. Kitty loved seeing Willy and so did Jack, but only when one of us brought him to the shop. They lived next door but never dropped by our place. She was childless and in the first stages of Parkinson’s disease, with no visible symptoms yet. Jack loved Jaime and his wife and Willy, but seemed cold to us, indifferent. It slowly dawned on me why he chose this place for many years, this hell-hole of ignorance and poverty. It wasn’t just to take advantage of the natives. It fit his character to a tee. The island was littered in trash, lawless, and mostly a ghetto. The blacks were unfriendly if not outright hostile to us. Their anger at life in this place matched the inner turmoil in his.

I proceeded to work, had a productive day with Norman and disregarding all rules headed back to my apartment, (I called it mine because I paid for it, like everything else). If Sanita wanted to leave me she’d have nothing beyond what a court ordered, and end up single and struggling in finances, forced to work to make ends meet, or dependent on some other man, probably becoming abusive to her as her many faults surfaced, (which exactly described her situation six years later). My concern was slowly switching from her to my son’s welfare.

But she returned that evening, sat with me in the living room, quiet, almost glad to see me. We had a normal dinner. I played with Willy a bit and we went to bed as if nothing happened. She told me she’d spent the night and day with a girlfriend whom I didn’t know that well, (a recent and brief acquaintance) who convinced her to file the charges that day even though she felt bad and reluctant in doing so. Now, as she whispered to me in bed, she regretted that advice. But nothing happened. The police never followed up, as usual, and life went on as before the whole time we were there, the next year and two months. The St. Croix police were totally useless. They were all black and living off the yearly welfare money sent by the U.S. government.